Assuming they missed on the first one.
“Down!” Chase yelled, dropping the tripod and pulling Sophia behind the fallen boulders. The SIG’s harsh bark filled the crevasse, a three-shot burst blasting chunks from their cover. But the bullets didn’t penetrate it, the millennia-old blue ice compressed almost as densely as stone.
“Come on!” He crawled into a narrow gap between two larger blocks. Another burst of gunfire, ice cracking and splintering. He pushed Sophia under the overhang, peering upward as the rasp of the first paracraft’s engine grew louder—and part of the ice above exploded, hit by a high-power bullet from the sniper rifle. Fist-sized chunks of ice bombarded him. The paracraft roared overhead, a flash of black. The second followed a few seconds later, another burst of bullets pounding their hiding place.
“Wait there,” Chase told Sophia, shaking off the shattered ice and scuttling along the narrow passage until he reached a spot where he could see down the crevasse. Keeping low in case the sniper was still aiming back at him, he looked out. The second paracraft, higher up, was rising to breach the top of the crevasse and turn about for another attack, while the first had been forced to continue flying along the ravine.
It wasn’t trying to gain height, though. Instead, it was descending rapidly. “One’s landing!” he called to Sophia.
“I don’t know why you sound so happy about that.”
“Because as long as they’re in the air, we can’t touch ’em. If they’re on the ground, at least we’ve got some chance of fighting back.”
“With what? Snowballs?”
The lead vehicle touched down in a cloud of spray, having inflated its rubber skirt just before landing. The parachute collapsed, a huge red flag drifting to the ground as its lines were released. The second paracraft, meanwhile, had reached the top of the ravine, briefly disappearing from sight before swinging around.
Chase quickly unfastened his coat and shrugged it off, ignoring the numerous aches in his upper body. Sophia watched, puzzled. He found a chunk of ice the size of a soccer ball and stuffed it into the coat’s hood, bundling the rest of the garment up tightly and holding it below the neck.
Another glance down the crevasse. The first paracraft was making a great skidding turn, a huge feathered trail of ice crystals blowing out behind its main fan. The second dropped toward him.
He ducked back into cover. “Okay, stay under there until it goes overhead!” he shouted. “Soon as it’s gone past, throw me the tripod!”
“The tripod?” Sophia asked, looking at the metal frame lying nearby. “What for?”
“Just do it!” Still holding his coat, the cold already biting through his damp clothes, Chase turned back to the opening. The engine noise grew steadily louder. Keeping himself behind the frozen boulder, he raised his coat, slowly moving it into the open …
The hood blew apart in an eruption of pulverized ice and shredded quilting. Chase yanked the ruined coat out of sight, shaking out the ice and pulling it back on.
The paracraft roared overhead, rasping back up the crevasse. “Now!” Chase shouted, but Sophia was already tossing him the tripod. He grabbed it, then looked down the valley. The first paracraft was racing along the icy surface. Thirty seconds away, less—
He leapt up, jamming one spiked boot against the ice boulder opposite and ascending the narrow gap in a rapid chimney climb until he reached a jagged ledge. Another scramble over a broken outcropping and he was almost at the top.
Engine noise from two directions. The second paracraft had also landed, dumping its parachute. Its gunner thought he had made a kill and was eager to see the results of his marksmanship. Ahead, the first paracraft was closing. Chase hefted the tripod. He had only one chance, and even that was a long shot. If he failed, then the only weapon at his disposal really would be a snowball.
Closer, closer, the sniper aiming at the base of the boulders, closer—
Now!
Chase sprang up and hurled the tripod like a javelin.
It arced through the air, spearing down over the top of the paracraft’s windshield—and hit the driver, the spiked metal feet stabbing into his face.
He screamed, clawing at the tripod. With his hands off the controls, the paracraft charged ahead at full speed, heading straight for the giant boulder. The gunner tried to grab the throttle lever, but by the time he reached the control it was too late.
The paracraft smashed into the wall of ice. The tripod had ended up wedged between the dashboard and the driver’s chest; he was instantly impaled upon it as he was hurled forward by the sudden stop. The gunner fared no better, whiplashing face-first through the windshield. The engine kept running despite the crash, blindly grinding the vehicle against the ice.
Chase slithered down the frozen mass, landing beside the paracraft and reaching in to pull back the throttle. The engine noise dropped to a dull rasp, just enough to keep the skirt inflated. “Sophia, come on!” he shouted as he dragged the two bodies from the vehicle. “I’ve got us a ride!”
Sophia emerged from the boulders. “The other one’s still coming.”
“Yeah, but we’ve got guns now—that should even things up a bit.” The scope of the sniper rifle had been broken in the crash, but the driver’s weapon, a SIG SG-551 assault rifle, seemed undamaged. “It’s not like hunting pheasants, but you remember how to shoot, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I may be a little rusty—for some strange reason, they never let me use the practice range at Guantánamo.” Chase pulled the floating craft around to face down the crevasse. “Do you know how to drive this thing?” she asked.
“Not really. You?”
“Not at all.”
“In that case, I’ll drive, you shoot.” He climbed into the driver’s seat, the paracraft wallowing with the extra weight. The steering column, hinged to act as a flight control, dipped as he brushed it. Sophia sat beside him, hefting the SIG. Over the engine’s grumble, they could hear the buzz of the other paracraft. “Ready?”
“Hardly, but—”
Chase rammed the throttle forward.
The engine screamed, a freezing backblast whipping around them from the wall of ice behind. The paracraft leapt forward, slewing almost sideways before Chase managed to redirect the steering vanes behind the fan and straighten out.
“—I doubt that makes any difference,” she finished.
Chase looked back, his view partly obscured by the cloud of ice particles the paracraft was kicking up in its wake. They were leaving the boulders behind with surprising speed—but their new ride was already showing its weaknesses. Hovercraft had very little grip at the best of times, only the friction of the thick rubber skirt against the ground, and on newly frozen ice it was practically zero. “Jesus!” he gasped. “It’s like trying to steer a bar of soap along the bottom of the bath!”
“They don’t seem to be having any trouble,” Sophia said. The second paracraft had rounded the barricade and was sweeping after them in a long, carefully controlled drift.
“Bloody show-offs!”
They burst out into the sunlight, the crevasse’s walls falling away as they reached an ice plain. In the distance, Chase saw the tilt-rotor heading in their direction. Holding the wheel with one hand, he raised the radio. “Matt! We’re moving—we’re in a hovercraft!”
“Hovercraft, huh?” Trulli’s voice crackled. “You know, nothing you guys do surprises me anymore. I see you.”
“But we’ve got company—hold back until we get rid of them!”
“How’re you going to do that?”
Chase gave Sophia a pointed look. “Shooting at them would be a good start.”
“I was waiting for a decent shot,” she sniped. “But I can just hose them with bullets if you like. It’s not as though I only have one magazine or anything.”
“Just shoot them!”
Sophia fired, keeping the SIG on single-shot to improve her aim. It didn’t make much difference, the buffeting of the paracraft throwing both her
shots wide.
The new threat spurred on their enemies, however. The gunner fired back—on full auto, bullets cracking the fan’s fiberglass casing. Sophia gasped and ducked. “Shit!” Chase yelped as a piece of debris spun past him. He looked over his shoulder to see the other paracraft change course and fall in behind them—so that Sophia’s line of fire would be blocked by the fan.
He tried to bring the vehicle back into her view. The paracraft turned—too fast, spinning around its center of gravity while still racing across the ice field in a straight line. He attempted to compensate, but they had already made a half turn, so that they were facing their pursuers … and with the fan pointing backward, they were rapidly slowing.
“Oh, nice driving!” Sophia sneered as she squeezed off a pair of three-round bursts at the approaching paracraft. She and Chase both ducked as the gunner returned fire. The windshield shattered, bullets plunking through the hull. There was a flat whap! and a shriek of escaping air as the skirt was punctured, the paracraft’s nose dipping as the bullet hole widened and split the rubber.
Chase steered one way, the Covenant driver the other as the two paracrafts whipped past each other. Sophia tracked the other vehicle, still firing and scoring hits—but only to the bodywork, not its occupants. She glanced at the SIG’s magazine, which was made from a translucent plastic, showing how many bullets she had left. It was half empty. “Running low!”
“So make ’em count” was the only advice Chase could offer her as he fought with the controls. The damage to the skirt had made the paracraft even more unwieldy, the nose pitching downward. “Get in the back. I need to balance this thing!”
The other paracraft turned with considerably more grace, performing a sweeping ballet across the ice compared to Chase’s duck-on-a-frozen-pond maneuvering. He searched for anything that might help him. The BA609 was circling, holding back out of rifle range. There were some ice ridges that might provide partial cover, but everything else was smooth and glossy where the lake water had frozen over the past day.
There had been a hell of a lot of water, though. The plain wasn’t that big—some of it must have drained away elsewhere …
Sophia dropped onto the rear seats, the shift in weight raising the paracraft’s nose slightly. She reacquired her target and fired another burst, this time hitting only ice. Chase clutched the radio. “Matt! I need a spotter—can you see any crevasses or cliffs?”
“Yeah, about ten o’clock from you” came the reply. “There’s a cliff—a big cliff.”
“Thanks!” Chase changed course, making a quarter turn to the left to see the cliff edge in the distance, a thin bite out of the horizon. Quickly getting closer.
He adjusted his heading, the second paracraft disappearing behind the fan. The spray would obscure its view of what lay ahead, hopefully until it was too late. He looked over the paracraft’s other controls, finding a lever that might prove helpful …
“They’re catching up,” Sophia warned.
“Get down,” Chase told her, reducing the throttle. The paracraft’s engine, mounted beneath the fan, would give them both some protection. But not much.
“Why are you slowing down?”
“I need to get them closer.”
“Closer?”
“I’m going to turn so they’ll come round on our left.” The cliff was now clearly visible ahead, the absence of any landscape beyond it suggesting quite a fall. “Shoot if you get the chance—otherwise just hold on tight!”
She braced herself across the rear seats as Chase kept driving. One hand on the wheel, the other on the control lever, he readied himself for the inevitable gunfire. The Covenant men were gaining fast, moving in for the kill—
Shots hit the back of the paracraft, splintering the bodywork and ripping into the engine bay. Chase flinched as a bullet whipped past him and punched through the dashboard. The engine noise became raw, ragged.
More shots—
“Now!” Chase shouted, slamming the wheel to the left.
The paracraft spun—and Sophia blindly fired the SIG’s remaining bullets on full auto as it swept around. The gunner was hit in the shoulder, blood and shattered bone spraying into the air. He fell back, screaming.
Chase’s paracraft kept spinning, pirouetting about in a half turn—
He pulled the lever.
The paracraft switched from ground to flight mode, all power being transferred to the main propeller as the smaller lift fans under the body were shut off. The rubber skirt instantly deflated, dropping the paracraft down hard onto the ice. It grated along, the combination of friction and the rearward blast from the fan rapidly slowing it. The other paracraft shot past, zooming out of the obscuring spray toward the cliff edge dead ahead—
Chase’s paracraft ground to a stop less than two feet from the drop. The other vehicle wasn’t so lucky, shooting over the edge of a vast frozen waterfall and arcing toward the ground hundreds of feet below.
Chase watched it fall, Sophia sitting up behind him. “Nice of them to drop by, eh?”
She made a disgusted noise. “Eddie, even Roger Moore would think that joke was—” Her eyes widened as the plunging paracraft sprouted a second parachute, the scarlet canopy snapping open to arrest its fall. Engine roaring, it spiraled back up toward them. “—premature!”
Chase revved his own engine, yanking the lever back to reinflate the skirt. The paracraft slithered away from the cliff. “Matt!” he said into the radio, seeing the tilt-rotor changing direction. “It didn’t quite work out like I’d hoped—how long’ll it take you to land and pick us up?”
“About a minute,” said Trulli. Too long, Chase realized—the gunner might have been hit, but the driver was probably a good shot in his own right, and if he damaged the tilt-rotor they would be doomed.
“You’ll have to pick us up on the move,” he decided. “Lower a line from the winch. We’ll grab it and you can pull us up.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“No, but it’s the only one I’ve got!”
Ahead, the Bell descended, engines now in hover configuration, and Chase made out a black cable descending from one side. He looked back. A red slash rose above the edge of the cliff, the paracraft following it a moment later—and dropping amid a huge cloud of blown spray, the parachute flapping away behind it. But the black vehicle didn’t hit the ground, instead gliding along less than a foot above it, the stubby wings trapping air beneath them and providing just enough lift to support it in wing-in-ground-effect mode.
And without the drag of the fabric chute, the paracraft could go much faster.
“We haven’t got time” Sophia pointed out. The Covenant craft was rapidly gaining, and Chase had no idea how to make his own paracraft lift off and do the same. “Matt! We’ll come to you—just fly in a straight line and I’ll aim for the cable!”
The BA609 dropped to around a hundred feet and slowed, the cable skittering over the ground. Chase turned the paracraft toward it, checking the other controls for anything that might help. A black button turned out to be the release for the backup parachute, but that was no use to him now, as it would act like a giant air brake and slow them even more.
All or nothing. He lined the paracraft’s battered nose up with the tilt-rotor, seeing Trulli looking out of the door. “How close are they?” he asked Sophia.
“A hundred and fifty yards, less—they’re catching up very fast.”
“Get into the front,” he told her. “When I say, grab the line. Soon as you’ve got it, I’ll tell them to climb—they’ll pull you with them.”
“What about you?”
“Still working on that part!”
Sophia climbed back into the front seat. They were gaining rapidly on the tilt-rotor, which tipped forward to match their speed. The end of the cable was a hook, part of the winch system they had used to recover Trulli’s submersible. It bounced along the ice, kicking up chips with each impact. “Go up,” Chase told Trulli. “About two feet.
”
The Bell ascended slightly, the heavy hook rising with it until it was wavering in the wind just above the ground. Chase adjusted his course to follow it, the freezing spray kicked up by the tilt-rotor slashing at his face. “Where are they?”
“Fifty yards.”
The cable danced just ahead of the paracraft. “Get ready to grab it!”
The engine noise of the second paracraft changed sharply. A moment later there was an oddly muffled bang from behind. “What happened?” Chase demanded, unable to risk looking away from the cable.
“They just landed.” The Covenant craft had dropped back onto the ice, the air cushion absorbing most of the impact. The gunner, his face filled with pain, had nevertheless managed to prop his SIG on the windshield, swinging it toward his target. “Eddie, he’s going to shoot at the plane!”
Chase said nothing, grimly urging the paracraft forward …
The hook clunked against fiberglass. Sophia grabbed the line and pulled it to herself, shoving a foot into the hook.
A burst of gunfire. Two shots missed, the third clanging off the tilt-rotor’s fuselage. The gunner adjusted his aim—
“Climb!” Chase roared.
Larsson responded immediately, the Bell’s engines whining as he increased power. The cable snapped taut and whisked Sophia out of the paracraft.
The gunner’s finger tightened on the trigger—
Chase hit the black button and leapt from his seat, kicking down the steering column and clamping one outstretched hand around Sophia’s ankle as she soared away.
The paracraft’s reserve chute burst from the back of the hull. The backblast from the fan immediately snapped it open and it shot into the air, pulling the empty paracraft with it.
Chase’s last kick to the controls had moved the wing flaps to their limit, pitching the paracraft into a steep climb—too steep. It backflipped into a stall, falling back to earth …
Onto the other paracraft.